While the Iranian president was busy stealing the limelight at this year’s United Nations General Assembly, Israel’s foreign minister was quietly carrying out a new strategy of normalizing relations with Muslim countries in a series of backroom meetings. During her weeklong stay in the United States, Tzipi Livni made her case at the U.N. as well as in a series of meetings with representatives from a host of Middle Eastern and North African countries that currently do not maintain formal ties with Israel.

“As the parties take the risks for peace, we look to the international community and to the Arab and Muslim world to offer support, not to stipulate conditions,” Livni said Monday in her speech at the General Assembly.

During the week, she shuttled between meetings with the Amir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamed bin Khalifa al-Thani, and with ministers from Oman, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Egypt and Mauritania. She also participated in a meeting attended by the secretary general of Oman’s foreign ministry hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The event celebrated 10 years of a joint desalination project in Oman, the only remaining active cooperation program out of the many joint groups that were established after the Oslo Accords.